Photo by Screen Gems
A scene from the film "Legion".
Movies don't get much more wick wick wack than "Legion," an amusingly God-awful -- and yes, that's God with a capital 'G' -- horror-action spectacle that alternates between outrageous camp and sobersided sanctimony as it slouches toward immortality via some future incarnation of "Mystery Science Theater 3000."
The highlight: An apparently sweet little old lady in a restaurant transforms into a foul-mouthed, shark-toothed neck-biter who crawls up the wall and across the ceiling like some sort of spider-granny. The audience at the screening I attended howled with delight. (The message: Always offer your gray-haired customers a senior discount.)
Photo by Screen Gems
A scene from the film "Legion".
Horror fans are used to movies in which the devil makes us do it, but in the daffy "Legion," the apparent bad guy is God Almighty Himself, who has "unleashed" the "dogs of heaven" -- his angel army -- to destroy humankind because he's "lost faith" in his creations. Instead of simply smiting us, however, the angels for some reason prefer to possess humans, "Exorcist"-style, turning them into Romeroesque if sometimes shape-shifting zombies who are particularly keen on destroying a motley group of humans in an isolated desert diner named -- what else? -- Paradise Falls.
The diner is ground zero for what is not so much an apocalypse as "an extermination," in the words of the self-de-winged Michael (Paul Bettany), apparently the first disobedient fallen angel since Lucifer (who doesn't even make a cameo). "The last time God lost faith in man, he sent a flood," Michael reminds us, in case we think a Lord-launched zombie assault lacks biblical precedent. Was Pat Robertson a script consultant?
Michael -- who noisily arrives on Earth in a dark inner-city alley, in the first of many elements borrowed from "The Terminator" -- has defied God because he believes humanity is worth saving. He knows the angel-possessed killers are gathering outside the diner because inside is an eight-months-pregnant unmarried waitress (Adrianne Palicki) whose unborn child is the "hope" of humanity. Why is this so? Is the kid some sort of new messiah? Who knows -- the script, credited to Peter Schink and debuting feature director Scott Stewart, makes absolutely no attempt to justify this conceit.
Others in the diner include (as if you couldn't guess) a bickering big-city couple (Jon Tenney and Kate Walsh), their sexpot-with-attitude teenage daughter (Willa Holland) and a gun-toting "urban" tough guy (Tyrese Gibson), who really loses his temper when he's caught in a supernatural cloud of flies.
Also inside the diner are its stubborn owner (Dennis Quaid); his loyal and self-sacrificing son, known as "Jeep" (Alabama-born Lucas Black); and a hook-handed cook (Charles S. Dutton), who comments sagely: "I gotta get my Bible... Somebody's gotta start prayin'." Because we're told that Jeep has spent his entire life in the desert, not far from Vegas, his Deep South accent seems particularly inexplicable until we remember that Hollywood producers consider anyone from outside the East or West Coast to be a resident of the same place: hicksville.
What to make of a culture that professes to take religion seriously -- that insists that its elected officials, for example, proclaim their monotheism -- yet also produces bizarre Bible-inspired neo-exploitation films like "The Book of Eli" and now "Legion"? These movies suggest that some Judeo-Christian concepts are as silly as the superhero mythologies of the Marvel Universe. Should we wince at this, or celebrate the contradiction as a manifestation of our commitment to freedom of expression?
"Legion" concludes with a Michael-vs.-Gabriel (Kevin Durand) archangel smackdown reminiscent of a battle of the gods in a Jack Kirby comic book, as Gabriel -- outfitted in some sort of gladiator harness, like a dancer at a dicey all-male bar -- slams his opponent with a battle mace equipped with springloaded knives and rotary saw blades. Mayhem abounds, but the film never definitively answers its fundamental question: Why is God angry at us? "I guess he just got tired of all the bull(bleep)," muses the waitress -- not a smart final line on which to end a movie like "Legion."
-- John Beifuss, 529-2394
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